Classical Music This Week: Schubert, Bloland and Lip-Synching ‘Salome’

Greetings, classical music fans. Memorial Day may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean the season is wrapping up. Quite the contrary.

Alternatives to Standard Rep

The New York Philharmonic retreats this weekend into a program out of the 1950s: the overture to “Die Fledermaus,” Mozart’s “Turkish” violin concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Sure, the conductor Manfred Honeck and the violinist Augustin Hadelich are talented, but come on, guys: surprise us.

There are alternatives.

Something old: A rare revival of Grétry’s clever “L’Épreuve Villageoise” (1784), by the eternally underrated Washington company Opera Lafayette, on Wednesday evening and Thursday at Florence Gould Hall in the French Institute Alliance Française.

Something less old: A celebration of the 100th birthday of the idiosyncratic dodecaphonist George Perle (1915-2009) on Friday at Carnegie Hall, with Leon Botstein and his American Symphony Orchestra.

And something new: I was doubtful last week about the originality of some works by the Austrian composer Clemens Gadenstätter, but the Talea Ensemble will be a persuasive advocate for him in a second concert on Thursday at the Bohemian National Hall. And what could be bad about John Zorn at the Cloisters on Saturday?

Image

Ian Bostridge performs a concert with WenWen Du, on piano, at the Park Avenue Armory in April.CreditStephanie Berger

Schubert Debate

The pianist Alfred Brendel, as good at Schubert as anyone, reviews the tenor Ian Bostridge’s recent study of “Winterreise” in The New York Review of Books.

It’s excellent — and behind a paywall. But free to all is a little skirmish between Brendel and the musicologist Walter Frisch from The New York Review’s letters page in 1989. At issue? The thorny question of whether or not pianists should take the exposition repeats in Schubert’s late sonatas. (Brendel was against; Frisch was for.)

A New Composer (for Me)

Until I received his new album, “Chamber Industrial,” in the mail, I’d never heard of the composer Per Bloland, who teaches at Miami University in Ohio. But I found his lush, caustic music irresistible, and I wrote about the album in our most recent Classical Playlist.

So I was delighted to read Matthew Guerrieri’s report in The Boston Globe on Bloland’s new opera, “Pedr Solis.” (As a bonus, there’s a stimulating definition of opera in the very first line.)

There are very few Bloland recordings out there, but here’s a live take on “Of Dust and Sand,” a piece on “Chamber Industrial” for alto saxophone and a piano whose strings are vibrated by electromagnets:

Lip-Sync for Your Life

I can’t be the only one who’s spent hours mouthing along to recordings of the ending of Strauss’s “Salome,” in which the title character serenades the severed head of John the Baptist. Now, for anyone who wants to take this talent public, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich has announced a forthcoming competition for lip-synching the bloodthirsty final scene. May the best man/woman/drag persona win!

For practice, here’s the one and only Birgit Nilsson:

Belated Birthday Greetings

Alas, composers don’t often dedicate pieces to critics. But Scott Wheeler did — and to one of our own: “Birthday Card for Tony,” from 1998, is a solo-piano commemoration for my colleague Anthony Tommasini, The Times’s chief classical music critic.

Image

Donald Berman performing at Tufts University in 2014.CreditPhilip D. Cooper

Tony’s birthday was last month, but Donald Berman will play the work on Friday at Bargemusic, alongside other pieces by Wheeler, Fauré, Berio and Ives.

Let us know if there are things you’d like to see in this space, and what you’re reading and hearing. Use the comments section, email me at zach.woolfe@nytimes.com or tweet at @zwoolfe.